Establishing trusting relationships between leaders and participants is one way that outdoor leaders can create an emotionally safe and productive milieu that supports the attainment of desirable outcomes. Multidisciplinary literature offers considerable insight into leader trust development and the outcomes that are linked to trust in a leader. This paper considers the contributions of that literature and offers findings from two studies that examined how outdoor leaders might gain the trust of participants. The results of these two studies suggest that participants develop trust in outdoor leaders in response to displays of both leader ability and character. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)